They turned back to the north, skirting the mere, and at last its margin curved away from them. They walked on through a dim landscape, and Jeremy, for his part, thought the air became a little fresher away from the slimy, rotting water. At least the land underfoot became firmer. For some time they made good progress. Toward evening they climbed a gentle slope and found themselves on the domed top of a little hill like an overturned boat almost submerged in mud. Tree stumps, not cut neatly but rotted where they stood, still jutted from the hill, and some exceptionally wiry and tough grass still grew there. “This must have been a pleasant place, many generations ago,” Gareth said. “Think! Once birds nested and fruit grew here in the warm sun of spring. And now it's nothing more than an island of dirt in a great sea of mud.” The hill was perhaps a half mile north to south, an eighth of a mile across from east to west, but it was relatively dry, and there they decided to pass the night. This time, though, Gareth ordered two guards posted.
So gloomy was it as the shadows lengthened that they chanced a fire. Melodia summoned Smokharin and explained to him what was needed. The salamander understood at once and produced a low blaze, hardly more than a glow, certainly not visible at a thousand paces, and wholly without smoke. Still, it provided warmth and cheer, and over it they cooked more stew. Gareth took cups of it around to the guards before he squatted to eat his own rations.
Later, the coals reduced to a few friendly embers, the party sat on ground cloths around the campfire. “A song would lift my spirits now,” Gareth said, “but the sound would carry. Let us have a story instead.”
Prechet, reclining with elbow bent and supporting his head with his right hand under his chin, said, “A story! And a new one. Let the outlander Jeremy speak of some matter that we've never heard before.”
The others agreed. Jeremy, embarrassed, protested, but Melodia leaned softly against him and added her entreaty to the others. “Al right,” he laughed. “Give me a chance to think.” He wondered what tale might please these warriors, what magical story might amuse these users of magic. A notion struck him. Well, why the hell not? “I'll tell you,” he said, “the story of a young prince of my world. Now, he had been away from home, studying, when word came that his father, the king, had died suddenly. He left for home, but no sooner had he arrived than he learned that his mother had already married his father's younger brother, Claudius.
“The prince—his name was Hamlet—”
“H—Hamlet?” Nul asked. He had some problems with h's.
“That's right. Hamlet was dismayed that his mother had remarried so soon after his father's death.”
“He should have been,” Syvelin muttered. “Something unnatural about that, I'll warrant.”
“Yes, well, anyway, while Hamlet was staying in the palace, he heard that a ghost had been seen walking the battlements—” And Jeremy was off into a condensed version of the play, as much as he remembered of it. To his surprise, his audience became entranced. At one point, there was a hot little debate going on the sidelines as to whether or not Hamlet should have acted immediately upon being told to punish Claudius. Syvelin was all for immediate action, but Barach urged the virtue of waiting.
“Revenants are tricky things,” Barach offered. “A cousin of mine was once visited by a ghost that claimed to be her uncle's. It looked and sounded like him. But later it was discovered that her uncle was alive—”
“Sssst!” shushed Nul, who was absorbed in Hamlet's soliloquy on suicide, rendered in butchered fashion by Jeremy. All the audience paid close attention, and at the sanguinary end, with most of the cast being taken off stage in a death march, they broke into enthusiastic approbation.
“You should write the tale down,” Gareth urged. “It would make a fine long ballad too!”
“Or a play,” Melodia suggested. “I think mummers could present the story very well.”
“Why Hamlet not kill Claudius after mummers trick him?” Nul asked.
“I told you. Claudius was praying. Hamlet didn't want his soul to go to heaven, so he waited.”
“Should have sent soul to heaven, body underground,” Nul growled. The story had really stirred the little pika's indignation. “Captain right, you write all down when we get back to Whitehorn. You good storyteller.”
Jeremy grinned self-consciously. “I don't know if I could do justice to it,” he said. “But if we get back, I may try to write down what I remember of the tale.”
“'To be or not to be,'” growled Nul, rolling the words with his round black tongue. “That the question.”
“The question now is who will be the first asleep?” laughed Gareth. “A fine tale, nobly told, and all new, Jeremy. You could make a rich living as a maker of stories.”
“I did that, sort of, back in my world,” Jeremy said. “But the stories were very short ones. Usually they were about how one kind of sweetened water was better than another kind, or how one soap made clothes cleaner than any of the other kinds.”
“Those stories no good,” Nul told him. “You make more Hamlets. Blood, revenge, love—that what people want in a story.”
“I'll remember, good pika,” Jeremy promised. That night, as he lay rolled in his blanket, the sky dark except for the luminous smudge of the waxing moon somewhere above the fog, Jeremy thought of the proposition. If he only had the books from home, he could indeed make a good living as a teller of stories. He wondered which ones he could bring to Thaumia. Shakespeare, certainly, and Sophocles. And the magic lovers should delight in Spenser. Tolkien. How about some more mundane selections? His audience tonight had found the most wonder in the ordinary parts of Hamlet: the clever trick of using the play to catch the conscience of the king, the heartbreaking madness of Ophelia. Would Faulkner go over here? Jeremy fell asleep musing on the possibilities and smiling to himself.
He awakened early the next morning, another day of heavy fog, and stood an hour's tour of guard duty together with Gareth. They talked but little, and when the others arose, they ate a hasty breakfast and resumed their westward march. Soon Jeremy looked back at the little firm hummock of an island with considerable nostalgia, for increasingly they waded through nearly liquid mud, mud that found its way even through their well-oiled boots, that clung to their feet almost like an importuning live thing, that stank and bubbled and steamed into the already foggy air.
They made only a few miles before coming upon another mere, this one much larger than the last and with less definite borders: here the lake gradually blended with the mud around it so that one could not be sure whether one walked beside the lake or actually splashed in its waters. Syvelin got badly mired at one point, going in up to his waist, and it took three of them and considerable tugging to free him. This day the fog did not burn off but rather seemed to thicken as time wore on, until the travelers, marching two abreast, could scarcely see the backs of those going before. Gareth cast about for an easier route, but none was to be found. Poor Nul floundered, for though he was the lightest of all the party, his stubby feet sank easily into the mud and came out again only with the greatest difficulty.
Still they toiled onward, skirting yet another stench-heavy mere, splashing through sluggish winding knee-deep streams, tending, as far as Gareth could judge, westward. “We could use Kelada's talent now,” Jeremy puffed to him as they tired to negotiate a stretch of particularly sticky mud. “She's never lost.”
“Would we had her with us already! But the general line of our travel is clear. We will soon reach the great river, the Hagsmere, and then I fear our true difficulty will begin.”
“Mine started some five thousands of paces back,” grunted Barach behind them. “What difficulty do you foresee, more than this?”
“The river is too wide and deep to ford,” Gareth explained. “And if it is as foul and noisome as these cursed meres, I doubt that any of us would wish to swim it.”
Nul shivered. “Ugh. No, thank you.”
“Then how do we cross?” Jeremy asked.
; “There must be bridges. There used to be a good road through these parts, the Market Road, back when some farming was done in the valley, and it crossed the river over a good sturdy rock bridge. Unless some mischance has wrecked it, the bridge should still stand. Yet I do not know where it is exactly, and finding it in this weather will cost us much time.”
“Will the Hag have left it?” Melodia asked.
“I think so. Her creatures are born from things that love the water, but they could not swim the river fully armed. But let us worry about what the Hag has done to the bridge after we find the river. Onward, now.”
They came suddenly to the river not long after that: a sullen, dark expanse of water that at first they took for a new and larger mere until Nul noticed that the bubbles on its surface floated slowly toward the south. The fog still had not lifted. Two of Gareth's soldiers were exhausted from helping Barach along, and the old wizard was in even worse shape. Melodia found a fallen tree and sat on the trunk, staring sightlessly ahead, her whole body trembling. “Now,” Gareth said, “we need to seek the bridge, but whether it is to the north or south I have no idea.”
Prechet spoke up: “Send parties north and south to look out the land. The rest of you stay here and rest.”
“I see you are one of the party.” Gareth smiled. “Thanks, good Prechet! You and Syvelin go to the south, and—”
Nul stood. “I go north,” he said. “Jeremy, you come?”
“I'll go with you.”
Gareth hesitated, looked from the pika to the man and back again. “Well, why not?” he asked. “Each party to go no more than two thousand before turning back. Keep good count!”
Jeremy unbuckled his pack and shrugged out of it. “No sense in carrying so much weight,” he said. “Will you keep the crossbow as well for me? In this fog I'd have no chance of using it anyway. The sword will have to do.”
“I'll keep it safe, storyteller,” Gareth said. “You do not have to go, you know, but I see you wish to go, and I will not stop you. Take with you the thanks of those of us who will rest.”
“We'll be back as quickly as we can,” Jeremy told Melodia. Stunned with weariness, she merely nodded.
Nul too had stripped himself of his pack, and together they made their way northward, Nul counting under his breath. A thousand meant a thousand double paces, a distance approximating a mile or a little bit more back on earth; Nul was shorter than a man, of course, but his spidery long legs made up the difference, and Jeremy was content to have him do the reckoning. The mud didn't improve, and their strides were not exactly strides, but still they made painful and slow headway. More than an hour passed by, Jeremy estimated, before they came to the end of their two thousand. “No bridge,” grunted Nul, shaking his round head in doleful regret.
“No. Pity the whole way wasn't like this last little ridge,” Jeremy said, for the last few steps of the way had taken them onto a narrow ledge of firm footing.
Nul grunted and kicked at the ledge, then made a noise of surprise. “Look!”
Jeremy stooped closer to the surface. It was rock—no, not rock, dark bricks, evenly laid. They were on a straight line of brick perhaps two and a half feet wide. It looked like a wall of some sort or—"A foundation,” Jeremy said.
“Yes! Yes! Place where man-house used to be. See, there ahead, on bank?”
Something jutted into the water. Not a bridge but some handiwork of humans, certainly: a crumbling brick rectangle, slimed with mud now, but once long ago, it must have been a pier. Nul almost danced in his excitement. “Market town! This is River Market on old maps, place where valley farmers brought crops, sent them south on river boats! Bridge should be north of here, not far.”
Jeremy said, “Well, let's go!”
They trotted along the line of the wall until it gave out, then found other traces of the older world: hewn beams, soft and rotten now but holding their shape still; scattered brick, mounds of rubble, and once a square, slimy pool where the basement of some building had been dug ages ago. The ground became cluttered with broken brick and masonry. It was firm underfoot at any rate, and they made good time for perhaps a quarter of a thousand paces. At last Nul stopped short and hissed in pleasure. “There!” he whispered, pointing ahead. “Bridge?”
Jeremy squinted into the fog. A great, dark, humped shape loomed ahead, arching out toward the river. They came a few steps more, and he said to Nul, “Yes! Bridge!”
It alone of all the works of human hands seemed whole. They walked out a little way onto the span, saw that the arch soared up and then down on the other side in one piece, and grinned at each other. Jeremy walked to the side and peered over a waist-high balustrade, but fog hid the water below. Nul came up beside him. “Not far now,” the pika said. “Illsmere maybe two, three hona past bridge. We go back for others.”
They started back, hating to plunge back into the mire at the end of the first wall they had come to but making the step anyway. For a time they trudged along in silence. Then Nul suddenly checked and looked back. “Hear something?” he hissed.
Jeremy listened with all his being. “I don't—yes.” It was a flapping sound, the sound of flat feet pounding through the mud. Nul drew his sword, and Jeremy followed suit, his heart beating faster.
“Sound like only one of them,” Nul whispered. “You go off to side, I stay here.”
“Good luck,” Jeremy murmured before he slipped away. He kept the little pika in sight, but went somewhat ahead of him and tried to steel himself to face their pursuer.
The creature burst upon him before he was ready, and it would be hard to say which of them was the more surprised. The frog-thing gaped, then swung its sword hard at him in a vicious backhand slash. Jeremy tried to parry, but the sheer force of the blow caught him badly off balance, and he felt the sword ripped from his grasp. He tried to dive inside the creature's swing, missed his footing, and sprawled in the mud. Just as he turned over, he heard his sword splash into the river. The creature had spun on him, its eyes glaring (three eyes! three eyes!) madly as it drew back as if it were a woodsman about to split a stump. Jeremy cowered back from certain death—
Nul came howling at the creature's flank. One chop of his sword bit deep into the creature's leg, staggering it. Its death blow came apart as it tried to turn on the new assailant—but too late. Nul, with a shout and a leap, chopped again, this time striking the thing's neck. Its head reeled back, spraying cold blood, it stumbled, and then it fell facedown in the mud beside Jeremy. It bubbled once, shivered, and died, its head canted at a crazy angle, its neck half cut through, only the spinal column holding it in place.
Jeremy pushed himself to his feet and for a long moment stared at the thing: manlike, froglike, it wore a helmet shaped like a turtle's carapace, a short, kiltlike garment of leather, and a scabbard. Otherwise its warty, gray-green skin was bare. Long bones showed through the flesh of the legs, a splayed and flattened rib cage through the skin of the torso. Its huge feet were webbed, as were the hands, one of them hidden beneath the body, the other clutching the hilt of its sword.
“Filthy swamp-hopper,” Nul growled, his chest heaving. He was splattered with mud and blood, the fur on his face matted with it until he was all but unrecognizable, but his orange eyes burned vividly when he turned them toward Jeremy. “Where your sword?”
“I lost it.”
Nul wrenched the monster's sword from its outflung hand. The fingers, really the supports of the webbing, twitched, opening and closing spasmodically. “Head already dead,” Nul advised it. “Time for you to die, too, stupid.” Hefting the sword, he frowned. He wrinkled his nose at it as he took a few experimental swashes. “This is a bad blade, old, rusty. But better than nothing. Here.”
Jeremy took it. It was longer by a few inches than the one he had lost, but it fit the scabbard well enough. Nul was already tugging at the monster's arms. “Help me.”
Jeremy took its feet and together they dragged the thing to the river. They tumbled it in. Nul shoved
its slack buttock with his foot, and they watched it drift out and spin lazily in the current, its nearly severed head hanging forward, underwater, a dark stain spreading slowly from the hacked flesh. Nul's ears twitched. “Another,” he said, peering northward through the gloom.
Jeremy drew the unfamiliar blade, finding its balance awkward, its hilt unfamiliar to his palm. The sounds were coming again, less regular but more frantic, it seemed, and again from somewhere to the north. They had no time to prepare a plan of battle, for it was already on them.
A shape burst from the fog, head low, running full-tilt through the mud. Nul leaped forward, but the intruder dived nimbly around him, struck out at Jeremy with no weapon but a handful of stinging nails. The body crashed hard into him, not allowing him room to maneuver his blade, and Jeremy felt himself borne down. He grappled with the attacker, rolled in the muck.
“Jeremy! Get head out of way!” Nul yelled, dancing beside them.
“Jeremy?” the thing asked in a familiar voice.
They had rolled into a broad, deep puddle, and Jeremy had pinioned the creature. At second glance, the head did seem more human, and the body—Jeremy dropped his sword and began to scoop handfuls of water into a face obscured under a thick layer of mud. His attacker coughed and spluttered.
Two gray eyes glared angrily up at him. “Glad to see you, too!”
“Good God!” Jeremy said, scrambling up. “Put away your sword, Nul.” He extended a hand to the figure in the mud. “We've found Kelada.”
Chapter 11
“Let's go,” Kelada said as soon as Jeremy pulled her up. “They're after me.”
“You armed?” Nul asked.
“No. I barely escaped with my skin, let alone a weapon. Let's go!” Kelada was caked with mud, coated with it: it was difficult to tell that she wore any clothing other than the thick black goo. Nul drew a dagger from his belt and handed it to her.
Moon Dreams (The Jeremy Moon Trilogy Book 1) Page 21
